It’s been a couple of times now where I simply put a comment under some shared link on fb or g+ without having ever read the actually linked page, that may is an article or some video.

Then, after I commented the post, I actually read/watched it first – which caused me to change my actual „opinion“ concerning that link.

So my idea is now to force users to at least click on the respective link in order to become able to leave a comment. This might reduce all those troll threads where people flame each other without having ever read the actually linked content.

This might increases the chances that those folks who want to comment the content have actually read parts of it before just catching on a bad headline.

Seriously, in which way shall nowadays‘ websites like this one give the user a clear, consistent and comprehensible way of being guided through the website?

First off: I *love* Rood.fm – they have nice radio shows, awesome DJs playing and generally do a great thing!
But:

1) There’s no clear navigation, in fact there are so many distributed navigation elements to reach different subcontents. Even when accessing the page via small-screen devices, there are too many misleading visuals (see point 4).

2) Which designer-chosen visual element suggests that this website can be scrolled? Not a single one!
— On some other web sites, I simply had no idea that the page contained further stuff..accessible through scrolling down.

3) Talking about accessibility..how accessible are pages like these for users with limited coginitive abilities?
— Where do screenreaders start reading on pages like these?

5) You’re probably enforced to use a website search or some search engine to scramble through all content layers of the websites: Just look at this one. That’s the site of a German University of applied sciences. Despite its text is German (which probably gives you the advantage of not having to read everything but just look at it), there are many subsites only accessible through
a. skipping the nonsense/misleading images everywhere,
b. perceive the link captions
c. hope you just clicked on the right thing.

Why the hell should important contents be that hidden. That’s [un]conscious stressing of the user’s patience, not helpful at all to get to the content quickly.

My wishlist for a better Interwebs:
1) No misleading visuals.
2) No misleading visuals. (Yes, twice!)
3) Consciously leaving screen space empty. There are sub pages available for subordinate contents. Why was this single-page crap invented anyway?
4) Form follows function – and thus: Form follows Content. If there’s special art or creativity-oriented stuff to show, then then this may be an exception. Anything else just should deliver content straight to the user.
5) If there is advertising to show, please have dedicated ad pages that open up as a redirecting page like adf.ly does – I love this concept, as there’s strict perceptional separation between content and advertising. I may even spend a second looking at the ad, if I’m promised to have ad-free content afterwards with absolutely zero misleading visuals.

There’s this one issue I’ve experienced a bunch of times after updating the SRWare Iron browser:
When clicking on an http link in chat/mail/teamspeak/explorer programs in Windows, Iron simply won’t open with the link I just clicked on. That’s mainly because there was a wrong launcher associated with http links: iron.exe
Instead, it must be chrome.exe because iron seems just to be a launcher, not the browser executable itself.

Use OpenStreetMap instead of Maps. Even finding routes for travelling is possible although one does have to manually check the result twice because there might be errornous street data entered by OSM users — if so, just go and correct them on your very own. 😛

This is what I did for just getting rid of most Google services, mainly just because I can. There’s obviously still not a hundred percent privacy established but I just want to experience what it’s like not to drain my entire life into Google’s interwebz